Tag: Miscellaneous

I like my new Surface Pro 3. Things were working fine and all of a sudden, the cursor would disappear. I just have the Type Cover and a memory card installed: no other hardware. Narrowing down the issue: if I move my finger in circles on the trackpad to make the cursor move in small…

Several years ago, my wife and I were walking through a local shopping mall. At the time, there was some sort of Asian festival. At a display booth there was a table upon which were two trays, side by side. One was empty, and the other had many beans. The sign challenged visitors to see…

I spent a few hours at a local company called 2Bot (http://www.2bot.com/) which makes a 3-D printer that you can attach to your computer via USB port. Yep, I said 3 dimensional: you can feed it an architectural drawing of a building or landscape, and it actually can carve it out of a block of…

Our several year old ink jet printer died the other day. It was an Epson Stylus Pro 5000. I knew it was on its way out, so I had been researching printers a little recently. I knew that printer quality and features had been growing substantially in recent years. I found a review by…

Several months ago, I wrote The mechanics of Sudoku and Sudoku puzzles screen capture. As a result, Stephen Toub emailed me and asked if I’d like to beta test his Tablet PC version of Sudoku. He sent me several versions over the next few months to test-drive. It was fully functional from when I…

There’s a sporting goods store that I’ve visited on occasion over the last 11 years. It’s a membership cooperative, which mails a percentage rebate check back to customers annually. I signed up as a member 11 years ago, which meant yet another card to keep in my wallet. For convenience, the store could recall my…

I read this from Raymond, which prompted this post. To qualify for greatness, an invention would have to affect the most people and benefit humankind in a big way When pondering this question, I’ve heard things like: Wheel Transistor Computer Printing Press Vaccines In4ternal combustion engine Cars Planes Sandwich Language Internet Tablet PC…

Of all the naturally occurring foods/drinks that humans normally ingest, is it true that all but two of them contain carbon? In any case, these 2 are very common. Maybe there’s a candy bar I don’t know about that doesn’t have carbon<g>. (Of course I mean pure H2O and pure NaCl.). I suppose that…

When I was in 7th grade at Amity Junior High School in Orange Connecticut, I gave a presentation on Factorial numbers. Here’s some interesting code: FOR i = 1 TO 80 ?i,Factorial(i),SQRT(2*PI()*i)*(i/EXP(1))^i ENDFOR PROCEDURE Factorial(n) IF n=1 RETURN n ENDIF RETURN n*Factorial(n-1) What do the…